Ravi Shastri against too many bilateral ODI, T20 games

Mumbai: India's team director Ravi Shastri on Monday agreed with former captain Rahul Dravid's views on not having too many bilateral ODI and T20 matches and said there should be more emphasis on the World Cup for the limited overs formats of the game.

"If you look at cricket per say, if you didn't have T20 cricket, I would say Test cricket will die. People don't realize. You just play Test cricket and don't play One-day cricket and T20 cricket, you speak to me after 10 years. The economics will just not allow the game to survive," Shastri said at an interaction at the Press Club.

He added, "You need that injection by way of T20 cricket. Now how you distribute the formats, how you balance it up, is there any need for bilateral T20? I don't think so".

"I don't think there is any need for bilateral T20 cricket and these one-off matches. You want one-day cricket play it but even that can be reduced. You don't have to play 5 one-day matches series. Keep the emphasis on world cups both in the T20 and in the 50 over format and then let your domestic competitions thrive," he added.

Dravid, during the Dilip Sardesai memorial lecture, had said, "I think one-day cricket is seriously struggling. One-day cricket, without a context, is struggling. One-day cricket, if you look at it from the point of view of Champions Trophy or the World Cup, is relevant. I think all the other one-day cricket should actually be driven towards playing Champions Trophy and World Cup. I think there are meaningless one-dayers and too many can actually be a problem."

Shastri also felt that teams should also restrict to playing three Test match series instead of four or five.

"I believe that over should be only three Tests. With the amount of these things that is taking place you will find that once you go for five Test match series, 80-90 percent of the time the home team will win and you will see teams going straight down after the third match,” he said.

Shastri added, "You saw what happened during England in Australia in the Ashes. I am a firm believer that in future just keep all Test series to three because imagine a side coming to India and they are three zip down after three Test matches, how much interest is there”.

"I am looking at a bigger picture, I am looking at the crowd sitting and watching, I am looking at television rating, I am looking at the way the game is going to the future and how you sustain interest from people who want to watch it and follow. I still think five is too much," he said.